Tag Archives: Rappaport 2016; interview

The purpose of the Rappaport Student Prize Panel, which honors the legacy of Roy Rappaport, one of the pioneers of modern anthropology of the environment, is to help develop and showcase some of the best student work in this field. Last year Amy Zhang won the prize with her paper “Reconfiguring the Black Soldier Fly for urban waste management in Guangzhou”. Below follows the interview conducted (via email) with Mark Moritz about her paper and research on waste management in China.

1) What is your paper about? What is the main theoretical contribution of your paper? What is the main point that you wanted to get across with your paper?

This paper is about an entomologist and his pilot project to breed Black Soldier Fly (Hermetia illucens) larvae in an attempt to devise a green method of organic waste treatment. In the last thirty years, China has undergone a shift from a planned economy of material scarcity and relatively little waste to a country with a growing middle class, where new consumption and disposal practices have produced mounting piles of trash that overwhelm municipal waste management infrastructures. Organic waste composes over fifty percent of the waste stream in Guangzhou, and in 2013, the lack of a viable technology motivated entrepreneurs, scientist and environmentalists to experiment. One entomologist believed that a biological organism offered a solution. The Black Soldier Fly (BSF) larvae — with its diet of organics high in oil and salt content — could consume waste typical of the Cantonese diet quickly, and the grown insect larvae can be marketed as a protein rich animal feed. In the paper, I follow efforts by a scientist to standardize the method of fly breeding and to engineer a transportable apparatus so that the BSF could be integrated into local urban gated communities.

I am interested in how themes of circularity and enclosures — two concepts that govern China’s approach to the environment, particularly waste management — are replicated in the ways that scientists imagine the biology of the flies and in the design of an apparatus to adapt the flies to the urban ecology of Guangzhou. China’s approach to waste is influenced by the policy of the Circular Economy (xunhuan jingji). Influenced by industrial ecology, the Circular Economy imagines all waste matter as potentially useful and aims to reintegrate it into further productive cycles. I’m interested in the ways that the BSF’s metabolic system is imagined as a form of environmental machine that can be calibrated to match the metabolism of the human disposal of organic waste in the city. The circularity of a life-cycle of an insect becomes the means to remediate or to create a circular life-cycle for organic matter generated by humans.

The project echoes questions that have been prominent in multispecies ethnographies of how humans might cohabitate with animals. Despite China’s long history of bioconversion, where animals lived in close proximity to humans and processed organic waste by eating our leftovers, contemporary cities have been purged of animals and insects; flies in particular, are regarded as pests and a threat to public health. I look at two potential models of fly-raising in the entomologist’s lab — an enclosed apparatus where fly larvae would reproduce without human intervention, and the ways that daily fly-raising was carried out through intimate human labor — to represent two models of co-habitation and relation between humans and insects. Despite a desire to enclose insects from human quarters, the daily work of raising flies generates new forms of intimate contact and care.

(2) How does the paper fit in with the rest of your dissertation research? How does it fit in with your larger academic career? How does it build on what you have done in the past and what you plan to do in the future?

This paper is the last chapter of my dissertation, an examination of the intersection of urbanization and waste management in China’s attempt to build green cities. I came into my PhD program thinking that a project on waste would allow me to continue my interest in issues of labor and the environment in China. I wanted to dig deep into one topic after working on a wide range of issues during my time as a campaigner for Greenpeace China and for news and labor organizations prior to my degree. My subsequent training in anthropology and environmental Studies at Yale introduced me to political ecology, science and technology studies, and urban studies, fields with long and rich traditions on the study of material culture, commodity flows and urban networks. The materialist turn or focus on non-humans, animals, and bodies in actor network theory and classic STS scholarship — for example, Haraway, Latour, Masco, Petryna — shaped my methodological approach to the topic.

Apart from focusing on turning my dissertation into a book in the next few years, I hope to continue to develop my interests in material culture and the urban form in a couple of future projects. Waste management is a complex world with more interesting questions and issues than I could ever hope to tackle. I want to continue this research through a historical and ethnographic project on the political ecology of the scraps sector in the Pearl River Delta, working with some excellent waste scholars of China. I am also interested in examining how China is exporting its urban development model to other countries in the global south.

(3) How did you get interested in this topic? How did you find out about this research project with the soldier fly?

The BSF project was one of many surprises that fieldwork presented. I had never heard of the BSF project nor had I planned to study organic waste. My initial interest in the topic of waste management was primarily in the labor practices of informal scraps recycling. Over the course of two summers of preliminary fieldwork, my focus shifted to looking at the mobilizations around waste to energy incineration and China’s formalization of its citizen recycling program, topics that were widely debated in China’s environmental circles. However, very early on in my fieldwork, I started to encounter companies trying to devise technological apparatuses to process organic waste in urban communities, proposing various DIY models of shredders and garburators. The problem of how to separate organic waste also became a key issue for many pilot recycling projects. I first met the entomologist at the center of this study during a visit to the Guangdong Entomological Institute when working with Eco-Canton, a local waste NGO, who were surveying the range of methods available to treat organic waste.

I was drawn to this BSF immediately because the project encompassed the possibilities alive in an urban environment that was in the process of being made modern, as well as many of the key tensions and contradictions in China’s approach to sustainability. On one hand, China’s ecological modernity is dominated by a strong belief that science and technology are a sustainability panacea. There’s a strong impulse to generate ideas, practices and forms to approximate model of high modernist efficiency, as in James Scott’s Seeing like a State. However, despite many of the dystopian narratives of China’s environmental degradation or the large state infrastructural schemes we commonly read in the news, citizens are actively seeking and experimenting with solutions that are surprising, critical and stretch the realm of what constitutes ways of being modern and green.

(4) Can you tell me a little more about your research process? For example, where and when did you conduct your fieldwork? What kinds of data did you collect? What methods did you use to collect the data? What methods did you use to analyze the data?

The bulk of my long-term fieldwork took place over 18 months from 2012 to 2013 in addition to interviews and shorter research trips in the summers before and after this period. Going into the field, I knew I wanted to take a “follow the waste” approach where I build up each case study around a particular type of waste object following Appadurai and Latour, and the commodity flows approach in environmental history, used by William Cronon for example. Conventional waste research typically focused on a single site or social group: a landfill, a group of waste workers or a local protest, see for instance, Joshua Reno’s excellent ethnography of a landfill in Detroit. I really hoped to tell the story of a city and by tracing different waste streams, I wanted to get to know as many different types of issues as I could so that I can say something about the overall process of trying to devise a waste management system for a city.

Shortly after beginning fieldwork, I decided to gather case studies around each of the four officially designated types of waste materials in Guangzhou: recyclable waste, organic waste, toxic waste and other waste. The data gathering process pulled me in many different directions. I began by working with a waste NGO made up of former anti-incineration protestors conducting their own investigation into the effectiveness of local recycling campaigns, as well as informal collectors in Tianhe district. Throughout the course of my fieldwork, I was introduced to many more people who formed local case studies – villagers involved in anti-incineration protests, government officials in charge of municipal planning and of course, entomologists working to devise solutions to organic waste.

In analyzing and writing up my field work, I’ve been struggling with a conceptual problem in my method of data gathering. Methodological approaches to large systems – in this case waste management systems – are difficult ethnographically. It proved sometimes schizophrenic to track the flow and circulation of different nodes of matter. Yet, coming back to the analysis and writing, the challenge has been to try and tell a coherent narrative or to find the relationships between different actors in the larger system. In the writing and analysis of the dissertation and book, I’ve been trying to think about how to “reassemble” the social world through these material flows and what insights this might yield. If anyone has advice or ideas, I would love to hear them!

(5) Do you have any advice for aspiring Rappaport panelists? Or any career advice for graduate students as you have just made the transition from graduate student to postdoctoral researcher to faculty member?

The Rappaport panel was a great opportunity to connect with other environmental anthropologists at all stages of their careers. I encourage everyone to apply and attend the panel! I’m incredibly excited to join the faculty in the Department of Anthropology at NYU this fall. My postdoctoral fellowship at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard this year was a rare opportunity to continue to write and to meet scholars working on a wide range of topics in Chinese studies, STS and environmental studies. In the transition from graduate school to what comes after, one of the best pieces of advice I got was to translate the ideas in my research for a non-specialized audience, and to frame my story differently for each scholarly community. Putting this advice into practice is always challenging, particularly when trying to balance between being intelligible yet conveying the nuance of anthropological insight.